The promise of SSD drives that take advantage of the PCIe 4.0 interface it’s staggering: achieving transfer speeds of around 7,000MB / s will be the norm and will make today’s PCIe 3.0 SSDs in the dust. Or maybe not.

That is precisely what Western Digital is proposing, a manufacturer that has just released an ingenious unit called WD Black AN1500 which are actually two SSDs working together in RAID 0. The trick could work, because according to this manufacturer transfer rates of 6,500 MB / s are achieved.

The trick is in the RAID 0 configuration

This SSD drive is different from the moment you see it: it does not adopt the format of M.2 drives, and the place of that makes use of a conventional PCIe 3.0 x8 card that is “punctured” to the board as we would with a graphics or sound card, for example.

The idea is to offer the advantages of PCIe 4.0 units to computers that do not have this type of connection and have PCIe 3.0 slots. It is a singular form of “extend the life” of our current PCs without giving up taking another step in the performance of our storage systems, and the idea makes sense.

The trick is in the use of two WD SN550 units that do use the M.2 format but are integrated into that PCIe 3.0 board. These units are configured in RAID 0 (‘Data Strippping’), a system that allows you to combine storage units in a very special way: it distributes the reads and writes in the two units equally to achieve that the performance is greatly improved since those reads and writes are done concurrently. It’s almost like doubling the performance of a single unit.

This allows these units to achieve maximum transfer rates that they can reach 6,500 MB / s in reads and 4,100 MB / s in writes sequential according to WD.

In addition to these performances, these units have a design that highlights the heatsink and a small strip that allows you to enjoy RGB backlight customizable.

Price and availability of the WD BLACK AN1500

The new WD BLACK AN1500 drives are now available at 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB models, and have a 5-year warranty.

The price part of the 263.99 euros for the 1 TB model. For the 2 TB unit it is 513.99 euros, and for the 4 TB it is 1,027.99 euros.